


About Uzericus

by Laetitia_Laetitii



Series: Aquilonian Cycle [1]
Category: Runescape
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen, History of Gielinor, OC backstory, Second Age, Zarosian Empire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-16
Packaged: 2018-08-15 09:18:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8050774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laetitia_Laetitii/pseuds/Laetitia_Laetitii
Summary: This is a backstory piece for Valerius Aquilonius, who is met as a young man in the Aquilonian Letters, and a somewhat older one in A Small Talk in the Rose Garden. It's about his childhood, his father, him and Dimidius, and an old slave named Uzericus.





	About Uzericus

     The year I turned seventeen, my father sent me to Kharid to finish my education.

     The reasons weren’t entirely academic –he also wanted to know how I would conduct myself once away from his immediate supervision. In other words, it was to test my character, to see what kind of a man he had raised. Apart from that, he wanted to separate me from Dimidius. We were often thought too close for what was proper, and he probably harboured the same misconception as everyone else.

     So, I travelled to Kharid, and spent a year studying at the Academy in order to prepare for a career in civil service. What my father made of my exploits, scholarly or otherwise, I don’t know. I wrote to him regularly, and the responses I received never contained either praise or condemnation. However I did, I knew I still fared better than my brother Acernus, who had before me spent his year abroad studying mostly wine, women and merry-making.

     However, it is not my time away that I wanted to talk about, but coming back home. Much as I had enjoyed it –the newfound liberty; the novelty of being in a strange city –I was heartened to return to Senntisten. I was glad to be back at Villa Aquilonia, to see my brother (who had visited me in Kharid a few times), and to be reunited with Dimidius and to see he had not changed.

     But that is not the point of the story either. What I set out to talk about in the first place was the change in Uzericus. He was my father’s cubicularius and confidante of sorts, in so far as a man like him could have one. He was also my oldest enemy.

     Uzericus! How we hated him! He would dog our steps and spy on us, and eavesdrop on our conversations, and blather to father everything he saw or knew, or thought he saw or knew. He would loiter around us and interfere with everything from my manners to my grammar with an endless list of corrections and remarks that made me want to kill him. He once saw me fall from an oak-tree into a nettle-bush, and having ascertained that I had broken no bones, told me to run along and laughed about it for the rest of the day. Not a few times he would catch me in some wrongdoing and haul me by my collar to my father’s office to be punished.

     Now, when I was around eight years old, I took to stealing away from my lessons. I was never put to school, as father looked down on them. Instead, he hired me a tutor, a very learned man from Lassar. He taught Dimidius as well as me, probably because two boys could as well be educated for the price of one. We would sit in front of him in the atrium, and he’d make us recite what we had learned, or have us copy out passages on wax tablets. I would often grow bored, and under any pretext I could think of I would leave the room, and climb out of the window to freedom. I would run over to the eastern wall, and climb over to the garden of our neighbours who never stayed at their urban villa. From there I could continue anywhere on the Southern Hill, as long as I stayed out of the sight of people who might recognize me.

     I would run free while Dimidius continued his lesson with the tutor, and return home at dark to find the whole household in tumult over my disappearance. Father would call me to his office and beat me, and then send me to bed without dinner. I would repent, then forget, and then do it all over again a week later.

     This went on for several months. One day I slipped away once more and immediately fled to the eastside wall. I thought myself well out of danger – I had seen no-one outside and the row of cypresses blocked the view from the house. I was already halfway up the ivied bricks, when suddenly a pair of hands grabbed me from behind and brought me down. It was Uzericus. He had figured out my escape route, and having seen me sneak out of the atrium, he had gone to wait for me behind the trees. I learned all this a little later from his account to my father, but at the moment I thought he had materialized from thin air. I screamed in fright, and yelled at him to let me go and called him a dog-faced old eunuch and all kinds of things besides. And then I tried to hit him. It was but a pitiful swing, the weak closed fist of a half-grown lad, but it was the gesture that mattered. I had tried to hit him.

     He responded by grabbing me by my hair, and literally dragged me back to the house while letting out the Menaphitic curses that were all he could remember of his mother tongue.

     Father was waiting for me in his office. I remember he was standing behind his desk, on which he had already laid out the bamboo rod.  What I had not anticipated, however, was that Dimidius was there as well. Uzericus never let go of me while he explained to my father what I had done, how he had caught me, and the language I had used, and how I had tried to hit him. Father listened without comment, and then thanked and dismissed him.

     It was just the three of us in the office. Father remained silent for a while, and simply stood there looking at me. Then he spoke. He said that my behaviour was disgraceful, and that as much as it merited a punishment, it simply wouldn’t do for a son of his to go around with a back like a cart-ox, no matter how much he deserved it. As such, father continued, he had devised a new policy. From now on, any thrashings I incurred would be dealt to Dimidius, starting from this one. He told me to sit down, and make sure I could see. Then he told Dimidius to step forward.

     I did not steal away from any lessons after that.

     But the point is, afterwards I somehow came up with the thought that it had been Uzericus’ idea. That it was his fault and almost his plot. I blamed the whole thing on him and hated him twice as much for it.

     Years passed, and the whole event disappeared from my mind. It was only when I returned from Kharid and saw him again, that it all came back to me. He was so old. I had never thought of him as a being of any age, and here he was; a frail and bent man with watering eyes and two bad legs, shuffling around and painstakingly performing the few tasks he could still do.  In the last years our enmity had watered down to indifference, but somehow I had never let go of the idea that his actions were motivated by premeditated malice, and that somehow he was to blame for what happened. It had never occurred to me that he had been held responsible for my safety.

     So, it was strange to not only see him so old and pitiable, but also to hear him greet me warmly. There was nothing contrived about it; he had missed me. No matter how I had behaved, I had always been a fixture about the house, one of the constant features of a life that had had precious little constant about it.

     It all came back to me then, and I suddenly realized how ludicrous my interpretation of his behaviour had been. He was not the enemy of my memories. He was an old man, who had been a slave for most of his life, though he had not been born one. Through hard work and diligence he had risen to a decent position in my father’s house, and had done all he could do to maintain it. He had been following his orders, and certainly didn’t deserve to be called names or hit by a boy for that. In a sense, although I could not see at the time, we had always shared an enemy.

     Uzericus died a while after that, you know. He was never freed.

     But it wasn’t his idea, my point is. He harboured no ill-will towards either Dimidius or me. He had no reason to. And it certainly wasn’t him that landed me in trouble. The point is, I was not supposed to climb in the oak-trees!

     Yes please, fill me another one.

     The point is. Now what made me even think about it? I forget.

 

 


End file.
